Tagged: acoustic

June 7, 2012

Out of the Coma: Comus returns from long hiatus with new smoky jazz edge

Comus, Out of the Coma, Coptic Cat, NIFE 014CD (2012)

Out of the coma? – more like out of the deep freeze for this English dark folk band whose last recording came out in the mid-1970s! And while some people might prefer that the new Comus sound exactly like the old Comus, one must allow that in the very long hiatus between the mid-1970s and 2012 the band members must have been listening to plenty of music and absorbing influences, and that very definitely shows here: there’s a mellow jazz edge to the music which makes Comus a bit more contemporary. The sound is fresh and clear and the Comus vibe still has just the right touch of derangement which is very necessary in songs like the title track and the following song “The Sacrifice”. Lyrics deal with resurrection, sacrifice and rebirth on a different plane of existence, and there’s a bonus of a live recording from 1972 that the band found recently.

“Out of the Coma” sounds like a very robust folk-oriented song with passionate singing, at least until the instrumental passage kicks in and that’s a real surprise with saxophone lending a smoky air. “The Sacrifice” is more like the Comus of old with male and female vocal duetting and a pastoral air with sweet flute melody, violin and acoustic guitar: the song swings from serene and peaceful to urgent and anxious as the subject of the song meets her inevitable end to appease an unknown pagan god and assure the next year’s harvest. “The Return” is a beautiful if dark song that switches from major to minor key and back and includes a soulful saxophone solo halfway through.

“The Malgaard Suite”, introduced by Roger Wootton, is the bonus 1972 recording recovered and cleaned up for “Out of the Coma”. Despite it having been recorded on a tape recorder, the sound quality is not bad at all and the song just sounds as if it had been recorded in a room with muted acoustics. The song is a tango-ing duet of male and female singing accompanied by violin and bassoon and at times has a jaunty rhythm. The muted sound actually gives the song a forlorn and slightly desolate quality that suits the recovered / reconstructed lyrics.

The album is a welcome return for Comus: it might not quite reach the heights of the “First Utterance” album in inventiveness and inspiration but there is still plenty of life in the band yet. Comus could have pushed the smoky jazz angle a little more to give the songs more grit and urban edge but that’s just a niggly point and many Comus fans will be happy with the band as it is now.

Contact: Comus

May 12, 2012

Symposia

A Blanket In My Muesli

Here’s some unusual acoustic experimental music made by the German foursome of Quadrat:sch, deliberately emulating the traditional instrumentation of 18th century Alpine chamber folk with their set-up on Stubenmusic (COL LEGNO WWE 2CD 20305). Using hammered dulcimer, zither, guitar and double bass, the quartet turn in 12 short-to-medium pieces on the first CD of this double-disc set, all of them composed by the zither player Christof Dienz, and they are lively, taut renditions of pieces which follow song-like structures with their winning and bright melodies, complex time signatures, and brilliant inventive interplay of instruments. These tunes probably aren’t directly inspired by folk tunes as such, but some of them refer to dances, and the title of the opening track ‘This Way or That Way or the Other’ feels like a simple homespun philosophy that could easily apply to the gentler life of 200 years ago as much as it does to the strategies of a post-modernist musician. Apart from a couple of slow “pastoral” pieces, the mood of this disc is upbeat and cheerful, and you’ll soon be ordering a pair of britches and leather buskins so that you can join in this merry dance on the slopes of the Finsteraarhorn. On the second disc, the set-up is “extended” by the arrival of the great Zeena Parkins with her harp under one arm and a bushel of alpine fruits under the other. The percussionist Herbert Pirker also joins the team, and the six players use plucks, drones, groans, swoops, zangles and many other pleasing effects in very abstracted ways. These open-ended semi-atonal and non-rhythmic instrumentals (which are also composed rather than improvised) are intended to explore sonic structures, and while the set may not be a direct “answer record” to its more danceable brother, it is very indicative of the way that short, compressed compositions can be “opened out” into these labyrinthine buildings, full of twisting corridors and pathways. Oswald Egger supplies an interpretative text to this fine package of interesting music.

The Man with X-Ray Ears

The lovely Felix Kubin has released TXRF (IT’S ITS008) as a double LP, albeit not an excessively long one – some sides are just 11 minutes in length. It’s a fine set of irresistible and enjoyable electronic music made with such tools as the Sherman 2 filterbank and the Electrix Repeater, which is a loop sampler device – in short, a combination of analogue and digital devices to create patterns and processed sounds. As ever, Kubin manages to draw convincing lines of convergence between Kraftwerk, techno club music, and the more extreme modes of academic experimental electronic music of the 1960s, compacting his ingenious thniking in short and portable statements that remain somewhat enigmatic yet also very accessible. He also retains his very droll sense of humour, and I sense an undercurrent of hilarity which informs even the most austere of these cuts, which Kubin performs completely deadpan. According to the press release, of which I don’t have a physical copy, there’s also a scientific dimension to the set, involving the action of firing X-Rays at solid matter in order to determine something about their surface properties. This feels like a throwback to a certain time in the 1990s when Disinformation, John Duncan and others were exploring ways to make electronic music using scientific devices like particle colliders and shortwave signals. We’re not told exactly how Kubin managed to process X-rays into sound, and the plausibility factor is pretty low to say the least, but through the power of suggestion (a strategy also picked up by the cover image) it does pre-determine how we as listeners will approach the music to some degree. As a double LP, it’s structured in four connected sections titled ‘Total’, ‘Reflection’, ‘X-Ray’ and ‘Fluorescence’, suggestive of a process that might lead the listener through an experiment to its successful conclusion. In case any of this makes Kubin’s work sound pretentious, let me reassure you it’s quite the opposite; when you listen you’ll be won over instantly by the clarity of his thinking and the straightforward way he presents his ideas.

We Imply, He Infers

Another German composer is the excellent Marcus Schmickler, usually known for his extreme electronic music pieces. Rule Of Inference (A-MUSIK A-37) however showcases his compositional skills, with three substantial suites scored for percussion, orchestra, and chamber ensemble. The title piece is in four movements and allows the Cologne Schlagquartett to exercise their upper body muscles producing the strident, explosive portions of the first section, and the more approachable gamelan-like passages of the second part; we also hear bone-like rattling effects, brooding rumbles like thunder, and even some quasi-African polyrhythmic passages. Apparently all this percussion music was derived from complex ideas about logic, mathematics, and astronomy, and we’re advised to look for parallels in the music of Xenakis, Grisey and Stockhausen. It’s enough to restore your faith in systems-based music when it achieves such powerful results.

Quite different to the above is the 10-minute ‘Symposion’, an orchestral work which presents an eerie series of very mixed chords to create an effect like a slow-moving Ligeti or Penderecki piece. Though no stranger to micro-tonal compositional ideas, Schmickler here is in fact exploring something about the history of equal temperament, about which I know less than zero other than it’s a tuning system. ‘Symposion’ contains enough dissonances to curdle your internal organs, yet unlike Ligeti or Penderecki’s music it refuses any sort of narrative, religious, or philosophical associations and remains largely an exploratory, “process” experiment.

The album finishes with four short chamber-instrumentals which are intended as direct tributes to Carlo Gesualdo, the madrigal composer whose colourful life was about as bizarre as the music he composed; it seems Gesualdo broke all the rules in this very rarefied medium, but being the murderous nobleman he was, he could afford to do so and the audience for madrigal music was in any case incredibly limited (I like to think the Renaissance was a simpler more innocent time before globalisation, lucrative TV deals and instant internet coverage was the order of the day). One of the rules he broke was using far too many chromatic effects per square inch. Chromatics is another musicological term which I don’t really understand, but I’ve heard not a few records by Gesualdo and his scores make singers jump through hoops to produce musical clashes and dissonances that can jar the fillings loose from your teeth. Schmickler’s approach has been to eliminate the vocal elements completely and attempt, through his arrangements, to compress all those delicious chromatics into handy bite-size pieces. I’m no expert as I hope I’ve made clear, but I feel Schmickler has somehow missed the exquisite jarring factor that is to me the essence of Gesualdo. Even so, these four succeed nicely as modernist takes on Renaissance music. If this CD appeals, may I recommend you rewind to 2006 and hear a copy of Demos by this composer, also released by A-Musik, for a fascinating mix of orchestra, choir and electronic music.

May 10, 2012

Ahad’s Master’s Garden III (2007-2009): The Harmonian Blues (Music for Film, Theatre and Dance)

Zsolt Sores Ahad, Ahad’s Master’s Garden III (2007-2009): The Harmonian Blues (Music for Film, Theatre and Dance), Fourth Dimension, FD2CD76 (2011)

This is a very beguiling double set of psychedelic electroacoustic folk by Budapest-based multi-instrumentalist Zsolt Sores Ahad and his band. In the manner of gypsies the musicians wander high and low through different soundscapes of varying atmosphere: sometimes intimate, friendly yet airy, a little sinister and ambiguous even. As the album’s title indicates, this is indeed soundtrack music for movies, plays and other dramas yet to be made: each track is its own self-referential world and evokes particular visual associations, sounds and even smells.

An early highlight is “On the Top of the Darwin Tillite – Climb the Aztec Siltstone”, an arduous climb up a mysterious pyramid dominated by a long drone that alternately urges us on and warns us of the curse that might await us at the top for disturbing the Aztec gods’ rest. Perhaps we might be sacrificed and our hearts offered to the sun god to ensure his continued travels through the sky. “In the Dry Valleys” offers up searingly hot desert landscapes in which a Cormac McCarthy western might play out. “The Sands are Running Out” features very distorted sounds that sound like they might be coming from an electric guitar, a very lethargic saxophone and unusual percussion that reminds me of a large floating hollow container in a tub of water.

“Potlatch on the Beach of the Dirty Little Hoare Pond – The Heart of a Poet” might be a spiritual quest as suggested by the sitar and an expectant mood early in the piece. The piece develops slowly and seemingly in a disorganised way but the whole thing is held together by the large spaces within and the questing mood.

The second disc is taken up by one track “Lessness (Meeting with Godot)” which is a highly abstract piece featuring very long tones and spoken-word Hungarian-language recordings of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”. The track was composed for a theatre performance of this play. For such a long and sparing piece that’s not very immersive and lacks much atmosphere, the music holds very well and generates on-going tension. It does get better in its last five minutes when proceedings turn very hysterical.

The whole set is perhaps best heard as two separate discs: trying to hear both CDs can tax the endurance and the long track does take its time to build up to the climax.

Contact: Fourth Dimension, Zsolt Sores Ahad

April 23, 2012

Mellowed

Glossolalia (HUBRO CD2503) is harmonium player Sigbjørn Apeland‘s debut solo album, recorded for the relatively young Hubro imprint. It is a sombre, droning affair that hones in rather intimately on the harmonium, allowing ample airtime to the various incidental creaks and cranks that accompany playing any instrument that is in a state of disrepair. Instead of bringing the listener out of the experience, however, the imperfections lend the recordings a sense of honesty; this feels like an album that was recorded in a room with hardwood floors, with Apeland and the harmonium sharing the space alone. Compositionally, the tracks highlight the gentle, almost insidious nature of the instrument, with the tones often feebly aligning into chords; it’s only the deep low notes that convey any real sense of power, giving certain moments a considerably more meaty feel than others. This fluctuating pattern produce a record that ebbs and flows in terms of intensity; coupled with the innate sound of the harmonium, the album takes on a distinctly nautical sound. Tuneful yet freely flowing, Glossolalia reflects true affection for an instrument Apeland has been playing his whole life.

Elsewhere, we have three diminutive three-inch CDRs from Toronto’s Standard Form label as part of their miniature “Rural Route” series. Alex Durlak‘s Catalyst (STANDARD FORM 3″ CDR SFRR004) is the product of a particularly, and it finds Durlak processing his droning guitar work “in real time using a series of granular synthesis patches to create densely layered and dark sounds not easily associated with their original source.” Of course I hadn’t the slightest idea what ‘granular synthesis’ was until I prowled the web for details — and I think now I’m even more in the dark — but the sum result is a fairly expansive, 20-minute cloud of sound that fluctuates between resonant hum and shards of choppy, distorted guitar. I would place this at the meeting point between industrial, improv, and ‘drone’ music, in that it’s ambient in a dreamy, whirly sort of way, yet piercing in a sense that you could see this having a black and grey cover and having come out on Mute or Some Bizzare in the 80s. And it then throws in things like “granular synthesis patches” to give it that academic improv edge.

Machinefabriek‘s Halfslaap (STANDARD FORM 3″ CDR SFRR006) is touted as “a score for the strange sensation of heavy limbs as sleep slowly washes over” (sorry, I love these descriptions the label has printed on the Rural Route series), and it is just that — a faint, bucolic lullaby of sorts that sounds something like a glockenspiel on benzodiazepines, its attack and decay characteristics all distorted. The formula is a perfect one for the seventeen minutes allotted here (this isn’t quite the Disintegration Loops), and one really does appreciate the somnolent quality of the sound. As the dreary chimes go by, they begin to stutter and lag, much like eyelids fighting in vain against a pressing tide of drowsiness. This music is both pretty and well-poised to put you to sleep — two characteristics that could easily be damning — but veteran soundsmith Machinefabriek wears it well on Halfslaap.

The most tuneful effort of the bunch, the Gentleman Losers‘ self-titled disc (STANDARD FORM 3″ CDR SFRR005) is a triptych through Europe constructed out of electric guitar, bass, and keyboards. It is dreary, free-flowing and intended to evoke particular images and themes, with a distinct Americana influence. For example, ten minute “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air” uses dreary synth tones and mournful pedal steel to produce something distinctly wistful; beneath the instrumentation is a disembodied field recording that ups the ethereal quotient. The two shorter, supporting tracks don’t deviate much from the established plan, doling out abstract melancholy in potent dosage. Yes, these folks take themselves a little too seriously (it’s hard to forgive a title like “At Dawn I Am The Morning Clouds, At Even The Falling Rain” — even the capitalization reeks of self-importance), and, yes, they’ve chosen to name themselves the Gentleman Losers and play sad, lonely music. Regardless, their delivery is evocative and mysterious enough to deflect most criticism.

April 4, 2012

Effigies and Epitaphs: black metal meets melodic flamenco guitar

Petrychor, Effigies and Epitaphs, Khrysanthoney, 2xCD (2011)

The set under review includes the Effigies and Epitaphs album proper plus the Dryad EP. The dominant music is speedy and furious raw black metal with grim vocals that arise and fade back into the music and which are not always clear, and pummeling drums that may be programmed. What sets Petrychor apart from many other black metal bands relying on blastbeats is the forays into melodic acoustic guitar music that seems flamenco-influenced; this happens at least and more often twice in most tracks. The soft music invites melancholy, contemplation and lament at the destruction humankind has inflicted on natural environments around the world and their replacement by grey soulless worlds of concrete and steel.

After a short introduction of soughing female voices, Petrychor plunges straight into frenzied blastbeat-dominated black metal punctuated by those episodes of flamenco guitar noodling. The music tends to build on itself, up and up, until we reach “Of Grandest Majesties”, begun with sparkling liquid guitar melody and further charging into more angry black metal boasting a galloping blues rhythm and a spirited lead guitar solo. The maelstrom pauses for a brief while for some intense acoustic flamenco guitar strumming.

The music continues to build until “Seared, Sundered”, an incessantly raging harangue against the encroaching human plague upon forests and plains, mountains and lowlands and their conversion to superhighways and buildings. Outro track “Behind Highway and Street” might suggest a resigned accommodation to the rhythms of industrial society but blasts of black metal here and there hint perhaps at a future resurgence and reassertion of nature in those parts of the cityscape least expected to give rise to the natural world’s vengeance; the feeling on this track is very positive and defiant.

The Dryad EP presents a side of Petrychor that’s more ambient and moody than “Effigies and Epitaphs”. The title track is not greatly different from what’s found on the album proper but the track following, “Gamma Leonis”, is a sedate, luxurious-sounding piece with piano, cymbals and a high-pitched shrilling guitar: even the black metal sections have a majestic, lush feel. “Of Salt and Sky” is another surprise altogether: a solo mandolin melody, plaintive and sparkling in its loneliness, is menaced by a sinister droning presence in the background.

Combining acoustic flamenco guitar with black metal works well but the novelty does wear off quickly and the tracks on “Effigies and Epitaphs” aren’t very different from one another. The best piece of the entire set is “Gamma Leonis” for its distinctive, slightly decadent style.

At this time of posting (April 2012), Effigies and Epitaphs and Dryad were the only releases Petrychor had but there is an associated ambient act Carbonscape.

Contact: Khrysanthoney

March 31, 2012

Forest Journey, River Journey

Ten songs of a rather lugubrious hue from the Italian singer-songwriter who calls himself Rella The Woodcutter. Previous albums have experimented with other genres, but on The Golden Undertow (BORING MACHINES BM037LP) he performs stark and deathly acoustic folk songs (sung in English), his pale declamatory voice accompanied by the barest of instrumental decoration – acoustic guitar, subdued electric guitar, recorder, or drum, usually restricting himself to one or two instruments per song. I enjoyed the melody and rhythm of ‘Bonobo’, where the simple bass drum and tambourine parts put one in mind instantly of Mo Tucker, but this song is uncharacteristic of the remainder of the album, which is gloomy and fog-bound, with many of the songs set in a sluggish minor key. As the tracks proceed, the singer’s voice becomes increasingly uncertain and forlorn, and he’s more like a wistful poet performing a recit than a full-blooded singer. In like manner, his vague lyrics become more wispy and introverted. Our interest is revived however by the eight-minute closer ‘Drugtime Family’, another song in thrall to the first Velvet Underground LP with its martial doom-march rhythm tempo not unlike ‘Venus In Furs’, and the acid-drenched guitars are cut through with an anguished lyric delivered via a shrill and capable melody. Rella would like to align himself with “psychedelic folk” music, and in song form at least is not far away from two of his heroes of the 1990s, that is Bill Callahan / Smog and Will Oldham / Palace. But for me he doesn’t quite exhibit the emotional depth of either, and I feel he could benefit from honing both his lyric-writing craft and his singing skills; the use of reverb on a microphone doesn’t adequately compensate for his thin delivery. Vinyl LP, limited to 300 copies.

Merzouga are two sound artists, Eva Popplein and Janko Hanushevsky based in Germany who take their name from a village in Morocco and have produced a few examples of radiophonic and voice work on their own imprint. On Mekong Morning Glory (GRUENREKORDER GRUEN 092), they produce a single 49-minute piece that is an ingenious work of electro-acoustic composition. The starting point was field recordings brought back from their journey on the Mekong river through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, which gave them a rich collection of field recordings of the tropical wildlife buzzing and swarming either side of the river banks. The second compositional element was musical, to wit subtle layers of strange music generated by Hanushevsky’s “prepared bass guitar”, an instrument altered through having sticks and metal inserted into the strings in the manner of Lee Ranaldo or Keith Rowe. Next came the electro-acoustic transformations of these sounds, where everything is subtly synthesised and changed – and it’s here the compositional process probably begins. We have heard quite a large number of experimental recordings that use the above processes in variant combinations or degrees, but Merzouga’s achievement is to shape their materials along the lines of a “compositional arc…inspired by the lower course of the river”. Geography itself has become their graphic score, and the idea is to create a heightened, semi-fantastic version of their river journey, and to this end the placement and ordering of each audible component is very deliberate and very precise. It’s significant, for example, that the sounds of urban civilisation and human voices are only heard quite late in the piece, such that nature and the wilderness (and children) are privileged in the compositional hierarchy. In case any of this creates for you a mental impression of the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now, that is probably quite deliberate, and the musicians even provide a printed paragraph from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for comparative purposes. Mekong Morning Glory is not as outright dramatic or nightmarish as Walter Murch’s sound design for that piece of cinema, but it is compelling listening, and gradually passes on its own variety of mind-sapping strangeness to the enchanted listener. The enclosed booklet of notes and photographs proves to be a useful navigational aid for this eerie sonic boat ride.

Crystal Hell Pool is the evocative alias of Chris Majerus. His Domain (DEBACLE DBL066) album is 11 pieces of muscular electronic music with a slightly dark and aggressive tinge. He makes many distinctive sounds and his use of sequencers and drumbeats is simple and effective, while he wisely disciplines himself to not dip his fingers in the cookie-jar of filter effects too frequently. Some of the stark melodies on these instrumentals are quite attractive, and along with the semi-narrative titles such as ‘Radioactive Cop’ or ‘Abandoned Gate’ they seem to act as half-completed soundtrack cues for an imaginary science fiction movie. File alongside your collection of not dissimilar star-voyaging albums by Oneohtrix Point Never.

Rolling Bomber (HUBRO MUSIC HUBRO CD2512) is a mostly-percussion album played by Erland Dahlen. The basis for each of these seven tracks seems to be his 1940s Slingerland drumkit; he’s got one of the rare and collectible Rolling Bomber kits, which was manufactured using wood for the many of the parts usually made with metal, which was scarce as it was needed for the war effort. The American Slingerland company has made a significant contribution to the history of jazz music, traditions which this Norwegian jazz drummer hopes to advance with his very timbral exploration of the drums on this album. To each rattling and rumbling improvisation he adds overdubs of more percussion, including gongs, timpani, maracas, bells, log drum; and minimal melodies of ambient quirkiness, played on the kalimba or the musical saw. You may imagine that all of this patchworkery creates a very sumptuous and unusual sonic playground, and you’d be absolutely right; I’d be safe in saying I haven’t heard a record that sounds quite like this. In case the Harry Partch dimension here wasn’t clear enough for you, Dahlen also plays custom instruments hand-made by Hallvard W. Hagen, including the Cakeform With Springs ¹ and certain box instruments; as one half of Xploding Plastix, Hagen has been spotted wearing the white jumpsuit affair that marks him out as an inventor-boffin type, which makes him ideally suited for an idiosyncratic release such as this one. In case you were wondering Rolling Bomber is a very rewarding listen, and while it can be slow-moving and melancholic in places, it is not simply process-based nor a stiffly formal exploration of drum timbres and percussive events. While it’s experimental in nature, Dahlen’s jazz sensibilities have not been left at home for the making of this record.

This sounds like it ought to be more elaborate than it is; it’s likely to be a kitchen utensil for baking cakes, with added springs. Chris Cutler, often jokingly referred to as Chris Cutlery, would no doubt approve heartily. ↩

March 25, 2012

Primordial Wasps

Pillow Talk

Very nice to have discovered the vocal work of Bonnie Barnett, appearing on In Between Dreams (PFMENTUM PFMCD063) as the leader of Bonnie Barnett Group. She’s an improviser and composer who lives in Los Angeles, and creates an extemporised form of vocal music which is pleasant and surprising. Not as fiercely extreme as the UK’s voice-wildman Phil Minton, nor even comparable to the trippy skitterings of Norma Winstone, she occupies her own space with these smoky wordless half-sung utterings. Quite often her genius scat-babble is as intimate and incomprehensible as the murmurings of a sleep-talker, an impression which the title may be alluding to. While Barnett is capable of doing the gymnastic workout of ultra-fast syllable delivery, by which I mean consonants delivered from a jazzy machine-gun in the mode of an avant-garde Jon Hendricks, she mostly proceeds at an unhurried pace, interlocking her vocals with the unpredictable moves of the rhythm section, that is the bassist Hal Onserud and drummer Garth Powell. The excellent Richard Wood contributes suitably oneiric and autumnal woodwind blasts with his mystery horns, and reminds us how these instruments can, in the jazz context, resemble the speech of human voices. Most of the material is abstract improvised breath-a-thons, but two tracks use actual texts; the eight-minute ‘Matisse’ which comes from the writing of Gertrude Stein, and the ten-minute ‘Nothingness’ which is based on Jean-Paul Sartre. Both of these are rapped out with stark clarity in a voice which rings with authority, every letter clearly outlined on her crystal tongue, as though Ms Barnett were a human typewriter and your ears are the big roll of paper which became On The Road. It’s like attending literature and linguistics classes at an impossibly hip college where all the professors are jazz beatniks, and you get your diploma awarded in cut-up form by Brion Gysin.

Mad Hatter’s Songs

Layers Of The Onion sent us their 3-track album Hal-An-Tow (OHM RECORDS 2.4 OHM / APARTMENT RECORDS APAREC030 / DRONING-ON RECORDS DRONCD15) in December 2011. This is the duo of Norwegian Fredrik Ness Sevendal with the English player Martin Scott Powell, joined on one track by Aaron Moore from Volcano The Bear. I haven’t heard much from Sevendal since the droney electronic record Song Of Degrees he made with Bill Wood in 2003, although he’s also a member of Kobi, the Norwegian group with a fluid line-up which combines acoustic instruments with field recordings. In project name and title, this release cleverly references an album by The Incredible String Band and the traditional folk song ‘Hal-An-Tow’, performed for example by Shirley Collins and the Albion Dance Band as well as The Watersons. I don’t begrudge them that, but those two references are about all you’ll get in terms of actual folk music from this duo, unless the fauvist tinting of the cover photograph qualifies as an “acid folk” album cover. ‘When Acorns Reach The Sky’ is an acoustic guitar riff which Robin Williamson might have used for two bars of a song, but Powell and Sevendal see fit to extend it into an interminable nine-minute circular guitar drone. The tuneless abstraction of ‘The Muspel Light’ is preferable, and has no connection with folk music at all – it’s a limpid and lengthy drone perhaps produced with bowed guitars, synths, electronics and theremin, and has a natural rise-and-fall rhythm which is not displeasing. My guess is that the Norwegian half of the act was the dominant force behind this one. In between these pieces, we have ‘In The Land of Sona-Nyl’, a curious instrumental composed of instrumental layers which don’t quite fit together, a tune that isn’t quite situated in any single key, and a drum track that can’t decide whether to shuffle along with a cool jazz tempo or a slow rock beat. It follows a meandering direction in an uncertain way, which indeed characterises most of the work on this album. Layers Of The Onion create an agreeable and unusual sound and, to their credit, do so through largely acoustic methods, but beyond playing these languid and spacey jams they don’t really do enough with it for my liking.

Haptic Birthday

Haptic are the trio of Chicago musicians Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills and Adam Sonderberg, also associated with Dropp Ensemble and Olivia Block, among others. While this is the first time I heard them playing together, Hess is familiar to me as one half of Ural Umbo (rich occultist drone music), and Sonderberg played percussion on a fine release by Civil War. Scilens (ENTR’ACTE E127) also exists in a quite different edition as a cassette released in 2011 by the Flingco Sound System, but here it is on CD and clearly marked “First Edition”. As to the music, I am baffled by its inscrutability. Heavy bass emanations, forlorn and random piano notes, shuffling brush-work percussion, and dusty alienated drones from nameless electronic generators. Where ‘The Ister’ is rather a disjunctive exploration into these unknown territories, ‘Setae’ and ‘Winter Wasp’ are more integrated drone pieces, with a very solid and tangible presence to the thick humming sound. Yet so far everything seems stark, cold and almost inhuman, music of great doubtfulness delivered by shadowy men with stern faces and beetling brows. ‘Pentimenti’ leads us even further into the maze of cold storage units and malfunctioning walkie-talkies, and it’s like taking a walk through an icy wasteland which alternates with a deep-freeze meat locker. Simultaneously, there’s too much space and not enough, creating a delicious combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia in one handy thirteen-minute dose. Lastly there’s ‘Secret Track’, a 20-minute chiller which you won’t find on the cassette version, and it’s an exercise in sub-zero tension, its menacingly near-silent murmurs and gently purring layers preparing the listener to expect the worst at any moment. Quite remarkable industrial-minimalist music, and commendable for the fact that I sense it’s mostly created in real time by performing musicians, without over-much reliance on processes, effects, or machinery.

February 26, 2012

Then I saw the Congo, creeping through the black

As part of my musings today I consider a photograph I took on Friday of a Lego Giraffe in Berlin. All of us like to think we’re seeing something special on our travels overseas, but with the internet and digital cameras and everyone immersed in a rising tide of instantly-available images, I find some of that magic is wearing a bit thin. I need only click on to Flickr.com to discover multiple images of the Lego Giraffe from multiple contributors, each of them probably equally unexceptional, with mine being the most banal of them all. Before digital cameras, I suppose it was only the poor bloke who worked in the one-hour photo place that experienced this awful disenchantment brought about by a plenitude of interchangeable views of the seven wonders of the world. By sheer volume and repetition of images, the specialness and unattainability of experience is being worn away, its erosion measurable in bits and bytes.

An artist ought to give us a special view of the world. Today for me it’s possible to imagine a surreal vista of green sunlit fields of Cambridge in June, overlaid with a view of the Savannahs of Africa, a 1930s photograph of mud flats in Mississippi and the floodplains of Thailand as presented by National Geographic magazine. It’s a kaleidoscopic vision, but it’s coherent – all the geographical features match up. Hard by is my guide C Joynes in his sun helmet, his acoustic guitar and banjo under one arm, and a clutch of albums under the other – English folk from the Topic label, 1960s free jazz on Atlantic, old 78s by Skip James and Charley Patton, his mind constantly making cross-references between these and with the Folkways LPs of Indonesian and Asian music provided by friend Simon Loynes, who is within hailing distance. Images swim back and forth, birds fly backwards reversing time with their wings, mighty trees sink into the ground, and spectres rise from unknown locales. All this is accomplished in short, compressed musical utterances performed with the grace and lightness of touch of a true master.

Hope some of this conveys how delighted I am with the new album from C Joynes, Congo (BO’ WEAVIL RECORDINGS WEAVIL46 CD) which arrived here in October 2011, the follow-up to Revenants, Prodigies And The Restless Dead released in 2009 by this same label in a similar “house style” package. C Joynes continues to make gloriously beautiful instrumental music and, just like two years ago, I am barely able to write anything useful about it. In creating his crystal-clear blends of stirring melodies inspired by the folk musics of the world, Joynes plays mostly acoustic guitar and possibly the banjo, maybe some slide guitar on one track; he’s joined by his team of collaborators including Patrick Farmer, Dominic Lash, Simon Loynes and Richard Partidge, here credited as The Marsh Arabs and adding delicious touches of percussion, bass and stringed instruments. The violin work of Partridge is especially welcome, adding its scrapy and mournful drone sparingly at key moments, causing hairs to rise on the back of the spine. Further exotic voicings are added by Loynes (a.k.a. The Doozer) with his Indian Tarang, and his Phin (lute-ish) and Khaen (harmonica-ish) from Thailand. These additions are subtle, understated, not a jarring mix or a mannered contrivance; all natural, all good.

Bruce Russell, famed New Zealand guitarist and musical connoisseur, contributes the sleeve notes to this one and he joins the long list of writers, myself included, who are amazed and astounded to the point of being flummoxed at Joynes’ fluency with a wide range of international musics from the past and presents configurations of our wonderful globe. On this album Russell can hear exciting confluences of Indian, African, English folk and American bluegrass music, delivered by Joynes with his characteristic playing style – assured, measured, accurate as a diamond, and with no attempt at flashiness. Joynes is not attempting to bewilder the listener with an indigestible stew that mixes up genres, styles and indigenous musics simply for novelty’s sake. It’s not incumbent on us to decode all the resonances and layers of meaning, nor to attempt to spot the joins (pun intended) where the early country blues tune cross-bred with Martin Carthy leaves off and the Java gamelan music informed by Congolese drumming begins, and I’m not a musicologist in any case. Joynes has done all that work for us, and with his intelligence, discrimination, intuition and sheer raw talent, is carefully and quietly crafting a fully-articulated musical vocabulary that is quite unique and his alone. No purist he, one who insists on preserving ethnic music through slow fossilisation. Nor does he need to extemporise on his guitar at length with 20-minute guitar-orchestra symphonies; he packs dense volumes of information into tunes some two or three minutes in length. We can be assured, as we listen, that there is an honesty and authenticity to every note he plays, and all we need do is open our ears and let the beauty come streaming in.

I would add that on this occasion, what comes over very strongly is a sense of warmth and compassion as well, and it’s embedded in the very musical forms they play but also in the collaborative playing which is much more to the fore than previous releases that have tended to showcase Joynes solo. In his trusted team of cohorts and friends, Joynes is constantly arriving at a shared view of the mysterious other-worlds in past and present incarnations, and they are able to pass this on to us, giving us magical glimpses of ‘Joseph in the Sea of Corn’ or the terrifying ‘Ghosts of the Field’. As with previous releases, the musical tapestry is enhanced by a rich array of visual and written clues, scattered about the artwork of the release, and I will leave you to discover and interpret these in your own time, but the patterns continue to emerge – nature, fields, birds; musicological studies, tracing of sources, unlikely and unexpected connections; travel, geography, transport; personal and poetic names for things, such as ‘The Beast of Elham’ which is just too wonderful a name to simply be another musical instrument. Through these combined and oblique magical forces, Joynes welcomes you back into the world of the living and invites you to open your eyes and share the joy of simplicity.

Also available as a limited vinyl LP with a silkscreened cover.

1st March 2012 update: C Joynes writes to point us here and tell us “If Congo had an annotated bibliography, it’d look like these two mixtapes.”

February 14, 2012

Wach Auf and Smell the Coffee!

Wach Auf! (ØRA FONOGRAM OF019) was sent to us in October 2011. Here the great Norwegian musician, composer and one half of the noise band Fe-Mail Maja S.K. Ratkje reveals she has yet another astonishing talent, her remarkable singing prowess. Backed by the Norwegian combo POING, she sings her way through 15 songs which all have a revolutionary or socialist theme. At first I thought this was a modernist “classical” record of some ilk, a forgiveable error perhaps as it contains not a few renditions of songs from the Kurt Weill / Bertolt Brecht catalogue, but there’s also plenty of other unlikely material fit to stir your Marxist zeal and have you itching to join the barricades. Rudolf Nilsen was apparently a radical activist in 1920s Norway; two of his poems are here, ‘Street Boy’ and ‘Revolution Calling’. Hans Eisler, the Viennese contemporary of Brecht, is also represented, notably by his ‘Solidarity Song’ which he co-authored with Brecht. There’s a downtrodden miner’s song (credited to Trad.) that wouldn’t have been out of place in Woody Guthrie’s mouth, and even Minor Threat, the 1980s American radical hardcore guitar band, enjoy a brief acoustic rendering. Mostly though, it’s the pre-war turmoil of Berlin that sets the scene for the album, and I expect it’s these radical interpretations of the Brecht-Weill material that I’ll keep coming back to this for. So much for the choice of repertoire which is mostly impeccable for hewing to the left-wing theme, though I can’t quite fathom out what ‘True Colours’, the soppy 1980s Cyndi Lauper hit, is doing here. Even the cover design gets in on the act, with diagonals, red blocks, monochrome photos emulating the somewhat earlier graphic design forms of Berlin Dada and (even earlier) Russian Konstruktivism. Wouldn’t Chris Cutler have loved this record? Not sure, but he rightly supported Dagmar Krause’s similar-ish LPs of Brecht-Eisler-Weill songs, the incomparable Supply and Demand and Tank Battles, both from 1986.

Ratke and the boys have been doing this since 2000, when they first covered Brecht and Weill and started playing a commie-inspired night of songs once a year in a decrepit little pub in Oslo. The Norwegian pinkos turned up in droves, and the nights expanded to include speeches, poetry readings, and folk song; hopefully it didn’t turn into a debating society. It took the band 12 years to get around to getting this collection into wax, but it’s a corker of an album. Yes, Ratkje truly shines as a songstress, but it’s a collaborative set all the way; Rolf-Erik Nystrøm on woodwinds, Frode Haltli on accordion and trombone, Håkon Thelin on the bass; all the guys sing too. I’ve been listening to Weill’s music since 1978 (the way in for me was ‘Alabama Song’ by The Doors) and seem to recall reading that what the composer wanted was not traditional classical singers who were note-perfect, but actors who could sing; he wanted passion and blood in the song, and interpretation to enrich the meaning of the fiery lyrics. On that account, Ratkje and POING fill up the scorecard in nothing flat, winning the gold medal after just 2-3 tracks in. Especially effective is their lurid, excessive treatment of ‘Der Seeräuberjenny’, also known as ‘The Pirate Song’ (whose terrifying Black Freighter also loomed large in a subplot to Alan Moore’s Watchmen). In their hands, this song of pitiless, brooding vengeance is transformed into a violent, serial-killer snuff movie. The inhuman relish with which Ratkje intones (in German) ‘Kill Em All’ is a true shudderfest; she appears momentarily possessed with insane wrath.

The three instrumentalists meanwhile start off by delivering a highly entertaining form of super-fast cabaret music, played at intense speeds and with note-perfect vigour; soon it becomes clear what musical cosmopolitans they all are, and the album is infused with punk rock, folk music, klezmer, pop music, improvisation and free jazz. Not since bands like Ground-Zero have I heard this assured ability to turn a speeding song around in mid-career and tear down another musical side-road at 100 mph in pursuit of the “truth” of the song. You can keep your mannered John Zorn combos and his laboured attempts to meld hardcore guitar with Ornette Coleman. Nystrøm’s brief forays into atonal improvisation in the middle of a 1930s song are really something to savour; Evan Parker surfacing in the middle of a Marlene Dietrich clip.

I saw Ratkje with Fe-Mail supporting Wolf Eyes some years ago at the ICA in London. Amazingly, she’s about to tour the UK in March this year, with Ikue Mori; just four dates, one of which will be in London. She won’t be performing this material, but I would guess it’s going to be a memorable gig.

February 11, 2012

Bittern Predictions

The 1982 Trio – they simply call themselves 1982 – are three Norwegian players who play all-acoustic music with violin, harmonium and drum kit on Pintura (HUBRO CD 2510). With this simple set-up they achieve some remarkable sonorities and combinations of tones that are extremely satisfying, the extended notes of each violin stroke fusing with the languid sighs of the harmonium, allowing each taut percussion note from the drumkit to ring out like a small lead pellet from an airgun. In the hands of more impatient musicians, these instruments could lend themselves to performing modern jazz music of some sort, but 1982 are largely concerned with creating introspective, slow-moving and melancholic instrumentals, none of which have titles and are suitable for observing natural landscapes or under-furnished interiors. One of my personal favourite King Crimson pieces from the 1970s is a semi-improvised tune called ‘Trio’ which featured the interplay of David Cross’ violin and John Wetton’s bass with the mellotron playing of Robert Fripp. If you heard that, and you like it too, then Pintura is sure to please you. The clear, no-frills recording quality on this album is the work of Davide Bertolini working at the Grieghallen Studio in Bergen.

Full-bodied free jazz saxophone honk-a-ma-thon from Wolf Scarers, who are the duo of Keith Jafrate and Simon Prince. On Throat (THE NOISE UPSTAIRS NUS004) they both wield tenors like two Scots kings fighting with claymores, although Jafrate has an alto sax sellotaped to his midriff and Prince has a couple of flutes secreted in his enormous boots. Both these English hooters are long-established as musicians, but they never played together until relatively recently when they shared a bill at a Huddersfield music festival. I’m surprised to learn that, as they seem very comfortable with one another, their brass members locking together as perfectly as the antlers of two rutting stags, each one knowing instinctively when to offer support and proppage to his partner’s wilder flights of pufferment and zany toots. They don’t rely heavily on attention-getting over-blowing effects, and both have a facility with playing clear melodic passages and well-controlled quieter segments that contrast nicely with the more raucous and growly interludes. Listeners are especially advised to note the 27-minute marathon ‘Flagstone’, a highly sustained and accomplished piece of improvisation that flows and seesaws in flawless acrobatic fashion. As you can see the cover art promises plenty blood, broken glass and maybe even bare teeth, and while Wolf Scarers are not quite as all-out violent as that, this is a hot little baked potato. The label, The Noise Upstairs, is also an improv collective and venue which operates in Manchester and Sheffield.

Intense and ugly electronic noise abounds when we enter the undersea world of Horacio Pollard, a Berlin-living musician who spends some time in the UK and runs his Neigh Percent micro-label. Baracuda (NEIGH%MUSIC), like the vicious sharp-toothed saltwater fish which is its namesake, rips into you from the start with acid tones, obnoxious feedback, and harsh shrieking vocalising. Each track is a short episode which ends as suddenly as a nightmare trip to the sonic dentist of pain. Yet we may peel away these crusty layers of noisy cottage pie to expose the sweet filling within Pollard’s music. He controls his powerful forces as surely as an occult magus, yet also knows when to allow his alchemical serpents to slip off the leash and slither wildly into the air with their feathered scales. The further we go into this short album, the more dynamic and textured the music doth become, such as the very enjoyable (to me) two-minute ‘Shephards Prop’ which in this context is almost like pop music. In fact there might actually be a conventional pop-music record lurking somewhere at the bottom of this particular foetid trifle. However if you prefer long duration and relentless attack, then click on to the 10-minute ‘Itching-Togo’ where your predilections will be fully satisfied. Nine tracks are advertised on this CDR, although my version of VLC Media Player will only recognise eight of them, and #6 won’t play at all.

Now for some Italian avant-garde Techno on a Ukrainian label. The duo of Plaster are Gianclaudio Hashem Moniri and Giuseppe Carlini from Rome who profess a liking for the same things that would have endeared them to Kevin Martin in 1997 and might even have earned them a spot on his Macro Dub Infection compilations, to wit dark ambient tones and dubby beats. Platforms (KVITNU 20) certainly delivers plenty of atmosphere and the rich, bass-heavy throbs on tracks such as ‘Component’ and ‘Structure’ will simultaneously induce narcolepsy and invite you to move up to an imaginary dancefloor where you can sway your etherised body and stamp your paws like a tranquillised polar bear. When it comes to actual melodies, each track is brutally simple, and refuses linear development or variation in favour of monotony and stasis. I’m not quite as keen on the beat-less trancey numbers which feel a bit sketchy and samey, but there’s only a couple of these; the album closes out with longer remix-style dub cuts like ‘Rearline’ with its crunchy white-noise pulsations, the slow and murderous mood of ‘Double Connection’, and the minimal electro-screech of ‘Trasversal’. Arrives in an elaborate black and gold foldout cover designed by the lovely Zavoloka, and there’s a three-minute movie by their friend David Terranova (stop motion and slow motion manipulations of a ballet dancer, footage tinted in blue and black) included as a bonus on the CD.